Gibson’s Feelies

In the 1960s, Gibson (1962, 1963, 1966) informally described several intriguing experiments that compared visual and haptic shape perception; these experiments used a set of ten solid sculptures that he collectively referred to as ‘‘feelies’’ (Gibson 1962, p. 489). Unfortunately, the quantitative results of these ‘‘feelie’’ experiments from Gibson’s laboratory were never published (see Norman et al. 2004). About a decade later, however, Gibson’s feelies were used in investigations by Jacqueline Goodnow and Philip Davidson, and these experimental results were published (see Davidson et al. 1974; Goodnow 1971).

We borrowed the only known remaining set of Gibson’s 10 feelies from the Archives of the History of American Psychology (located at the University of Akron, Ohio, USA). Using a NextEngine laser scanner, Dr. Phillips and his student (and now professor) Eric Egan made high resolution scans of the objects. The resulting objects were cleaned and optimized using software written using Wolfram Mathematica and prepared for 3D printing with Autodesk Meshmixer.

We are making the scan data available here, for use by the research community. Please cite our dataset —